Faculty Assembly
Chair Kellner reported that there were three representatives from NC State present at the Faculty Assembly. The meeting began with President Ross talking about finances, why there is more money to this state, that there are structural reasons why we can’t get it because of Medicaid shortfalls, public schools stimulus ending and pent- up compensation and repair needs.

There are four legs as he described it for funding and he talked about each one. The first was internal money saved which requires the usual prioritizing, things like centralizing pieces of financial aid information, centralizing the establishment of residency requirements which is apparently handled quite differently from campus to campus and has to be done to maximize funding from each student.

The second leg has to do with the private monies and business partnerships where he noted the NC System lagged behind, we don’t have as much of that as we really ought to.

The third leg is state money and he mentioned three models. There is the high tuition high student aid model. Then there is the low tuition and low student aid model. Then there is the high tuition and low student aid model which we know is a bad thing and which we don’t want.

The fourth is the hardest and that has to do with tuition. We all know that the Board of Governors will be shortly voting on campus proposals. President Ross ruled that no campus can propose more than 10% and that the overall system request will be 9%, a small part of the amount of money that has been cut as we all know. He asked the members of the assembly to come up with “fifth legs” as new sources of funding for the universities. There were suggestions that universities that benefitted with specific localities could get money from those localities. The example was Winston Salem State, but President Ross said that was a bad idea which he had thought of when court systems wanted local funding too and that would cause unequal justice and he didn’t want to see it.

President Ross was followed by Vice President for Academic Affairs Suzanne Ortega who talked about implementing the performance based funding policy that they are working on. She talked about getting clusters of financial officers together to establish criteria for critical issues and items like retention and things of that sort. She suggested that there would be a number of these things sent out, and that individual campuses might select two from a menu and work on those as particular goals. Although she did mention that they are thinking about clock time, six years to graduation might not be as useful a broad model as seat time, that is, number of semesters that students have taken over a longer period of time, recognizing the number of students who don’t go straight through at one institution. The NC State delegates commented immediately, but we have talked about these things with Vice President Ortega and she said the performance based system could have campus buy-ins and it should be simple and it should be flexible.

Chair Kellner reported that two representatives of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education were there, President Jane Shaw and Jay Schalin the director for state policy. They each generously shared their proposals and ideas about higher education. It was interesting and we shared our opinions back with them point by point.

We had individuals from North Carolina Policy Watch and the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center who came and presented their views. This conversation was unusual, it marks the fact that the Faculty Assembly and General Administration is at the point at where we move closer toward the Governor and Legislature and where the world flows into the political life of the state and in that regard it was informative. On the whole, there was a sense that the propaganda from both sides was a little bit much.

Chair Kellner announced, because of the Faculty Assembly’s need to put together their own Executive Committee they are requesting that the various Faculty Senate’s elect representatives early.

Chair of the Faculty Election
Chair Kellner stated that he handed out the duties of the Chair Elect at the last Executive Committee meeting. He noted that it is important to recruit for this important position in faculty governance.

Announcements
Chair Kellner stated that a representative from the Senate is needed to serve on the University Research Committee.

The General Faculty Meeting will be March 13th and will focus on a land-grant related topic. If you have any ideas about faculty who might want to participate, they would be welcome.

3. Approval of the Minutes, Meeting No. 8, January 10, 2012
The minutes were approved as submitted.

4. Remarks from the Provost
Provost Arden reported on the various searches that are in progress.

We have several important searches that are taking place. We have three dean searches and two of them were kicked off last week for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Natural Resources. The committees are fairly large with about twenty individuals. Dean Martin Vega is chairing the CALS dean search and Blanton Godfrey is chairing the CNR dean search. We have an excellent search firm, Baker and Associates who did the Chancellor’s Search.

Provost Arden stated that this week he is kicking off the search for the Dean and Vice Chancellor for the Division of Academic and Student Affairs. Once again that is a large committee with around twenty-two individuals on that committee. That committee will be chaired by Jayne Fleener, Dean of the College of Education. We have another external search service working on that. Our internal search service is going to be working with the external services on all the local logistics. We hope to have these new leaders on campus by July 1, but certainly by August.

There are also two other very important searches that we are just starting and that is Director of Student Health and Director of Student Counseling. Both of those programs will be housed in a particular division of the new academic and student affairs and that division is called Student Development Health and Wellness, so there will be a number of things under that division including PE, Campus Recreation, Student Health, Student Counseling, and it will also include the Student Leadership and Engagement Program. That will be headed by Lisa Zapata. All of the searches will be national searches.

There are two other searches that are underway. Kathy Hart, Associate Vice Chancellor under Vice Chancellor Charlie Leffler is retiring and then a search for Ken Sigmon’s replacement, Associate Vice Chancellor for Development which is under Vice Chancellor Nevin Kessler.

The first of three Vice Provost reviews took place last week and that was Bailian Li. The reviews for Susan Nutter, Director of Library Administration and Tom Miller, Director of DELTA are also coming up and they will be conducted this spring.

Provost Arden reported that they have approximately 110 promotion and tenure dossiers working their way to his office and the first of them will be reviewed tomorrow.

Tuition
Provost Arden reported that the submission was a 6.5% campus initiated tuition increase and then another amount that was called “catch up”, which was the amount to move us toward the upper level of the lower quartile of our peers. Altogether that comes to about 10% when we look at tuition and fees. I believe President Ross will be making his recommendation to the Board of Governors within the next day or so. We expect that to be a little less than all the campuses have submitted. I think he is going to try to have the Board look at tuition and fees as a group rather than trying to break it apart and looking at it school by school or fee by fee. The Board will be looking at that and making their decision at their next meeting in February and then that will become a part of the budget submission for the Legislature to decide on in June or July.

The tuition and fee process is a long process but as Hans pointed out it is an important process in retaining the resources that we have to provide to the students what we need to provide in an educational prospective and to move the university forward. We traditionally have been a low tuition, low financial aid school and this could move it up a little bit but certainly doesn’t move it up excessively. Just to give you an idea, I do hear people talking about moving this budget loss to the backs of students and to me that is not the place to put it. If you look at it, the initial catch up that we proposed would generate in recurring dollars about $30 million over a five year period, so at the end of a five year period it would generate about $30 million into our budget. This year alone we lost $80 million in our budget including $67 million from Academic Affairs so this is not about shifting it to one particular group. What this really is more about is diversifying where we get our resources from around the university so that we can have a more stable, more predictable budget. So we will see how that plays out over the coming month or so but I think we have a very solid recommendation into the Board of Governors.

SACS
We are moving forward with our SACS reaffirmation process. Thank you for your discussion at the recent Faculty Senate meeting, although nothing has been decided yet, we will still be meeting in multiple groups. Discussing the Quality Enhancement Program is part of that. You will recall there are two parts for reaffirmation. One is the Quality Enhancement part, what are you going to do new and different to make things better. The other part is the eighty requirements that have to be met on a recurring basis and so it really is looking at making sure that we comply with those standards and document our compliance.

Faculty Excellence
Provost Arden gave a brief update on faculty excellence. The committee that I put together to evaluate the submissions on the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program worked very hard through the holidays. There were more than 70 submissions to that program. That committee went through multiple rounds of rankings and discussions. They ended up a week or so ago giving me their recommendations. I concur with the majority of them, there are a few little tweets that I had in there to look at combining a few proposals to making sure that colleges that weren’t represented were at least to some degree represented. I’m not ready to announce that yet because letters haven’t gone out to the successful awardees.

We will be funding about 12 different proposals which will represent about thirty faculty hires on campus, so we hope to get rolling on that very soon. I’m going to be having discussions with the Council of Deans on Thursday, once again going over the recommendations from the committee, but also talking about matching from the colleges as well for positions that end up in each of those colleges, so I think this will give us a start. Tenure, Tenure/Tenure Track faculty numbers have largely been flat on this campus for 15 years and this is not going to solve the problem. The Chancellor and I have said publicly that we would like to hire 200 additional Tenure/Tenure-Track faculty over the next five years and this is a start. Not all new faculty hiring will be done this way. This is very much an interdisciplinary model which is something a little bit new for us and we are going to have to balance the allocations of resources for traditional disciplinary hires that will occur down through the colleges and departments very much like the compact planning process that occurred in the past. When I talk about an additional 200 hires I’m talking about hopefully a net gain in that number of faculty because there is always faculty hiring going on just to stay steady.

Strategic Plan
Provost Arden reported that we did have a very good discussion with university council. We are going to have to tune in now on developing an action plan and setting appropriate target goals for each of our metrics.

Strategic realignment –We have a couple of task forces that are due to report out. Once again Margery is leading the academic science program task force with the appropriate alignment of our science programs and so once we get that report there will be some important decisions to make particularly in light of the fact that we are recruiting new deans for two of those colleges, so there will be some decisions to be made.

Provost Arden reported that Dr. Larick is leading the task force on Academic Programs Effectiveness and Efficiency and they have developed a group of metrics in consultation with the colleges/ departments. They have been back and forth in numerous iterations of the metrics that we reviewed to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of undergraduate programs. There will be a different set of metrics. We are in relative agreement about the metrics and we are implementing a preliminary evaluation of every academic program across the campus this spring with a goal by the end of the spring or summer being able to flag programs that we need to have a discussion about. We need to have a discussion about whether they need additional resources or need other modifications to the program. A week or so ago General Administration released some documents that had been sent out by ECU and NC Central which was their equivalent of this and they have task forces or committees doing similar programs on their campus and for ECU there was a long list of programs that they plan to either eliminate or downscale, so this is not something that we are tackling in isolation, we are trying to do this with a lot of input from the faculty.

QUESTIONS

Senator Robinson - On metrics, is there going to be some investment in developing metrics that measure the impact the University and the State of North Carolina over the long term?

Provost Arden: There is no perfect set of metrics and that set of metrics that you are talking about which measures impact on the state or even impact nationally is perhaps one of the hardest set of metrics to get - along with measures of employability and all of those things. The way we are handling it at the short term knowing that we don’t have a handle on those sets of metrics and it’s going to be very difficult to do that in the short term, is to recognize that there is a whole set of non quantitative variables that we have to take into consideration so it shouldn’t be purely a metric driven discussion. So let’s say we highlight a program for example, in MEAS that is underperforming under certain metrics, I think that is a trigger to have a discussion with you the faculty about that program and about a whole slew of things that we are not measuring. Getting a handle on the metrics long term I think is going to be difficult but important.

Overton reported that there are five goals of the Strategic plan that were adopted by the Board of Trustees in April of last spring. They put together five implementation task forces to consider each of the five goals and to suggest actions that would help achieve those five goals.

Goal 1: Enhance the success of our students through educational innovation.
Goal 2: Enhance scholarship and research by investing in faculty and infrastructure.
Goal 3: Enhance interdisciplinary scholarship to address the grand challenges of society.
Goal 4: Enhance organizational excellence by creating a culture of constant improvement.
Goal 5: Enhance local and global engagement through focused strategic partnerships

During Fall 2011, the draft reports submitted by the five Implementation Planning Teams were integrated into a single Implementation Plan. Metrics to assess NC State’s progress toward meeting its strategic goals were also selected. Baseline values for each metric are being established and target values will be set in the coming months.

Questions and Comments

Senator Zonderman stated that he worries that we are driving this by compartmentalized data and that the implications of changing the student population need to be carefully considered.

Senator Bourham commented that pressure to increase the number of graduate students may be coming from faculty.

6. Remarks from Scott Inkley, Director of Business Operations
Inkley stated that he has enjoyed the first five weeks at NC State. As I have talked with folks I have been trying to listen very carefully to their concerns, the issues that they think the Business Operation Center should be dealing with and some hopes for the Center. I can’t tell you all of those answers.

The BORST is working furiously and hopefully we will make some recommendations very soon. I can tell you that the Business Operation Centers are going to be customer service oriented and customer satisfaction is going to be the highest measure of success. I have repeatedly said that customer service will be the number one priority of the Business Operations Centers, but what I want to do here this afternoon is to say what I think customer satisfaction is. Regardless of what service you are providing the issues that the customers assess in whether are not an employee is giving good customer satisfaction are:

Employees are courteous.

Employees respond in a timely manner

The service is prompt

Employees keep me informed about the status of my request

Employees carefully listen to me

Customers receive personal attention

Employees sincerely try to understand my unique needs and problems

Employees understand my needs

Problem solving is customer oriented

Employees complete my requests to my satisfaction

Employees are reliable

Deadlines are met

Employees show a willingness to do whatever it takes to satisfy my needs

The transition to Business Operations Centers is about the realigning or redeploying of valuable university assets to where they are needed. The business support staff currently doing the work has the knowledge, skills, and abilities that we need to staff BOCs. I intend to collaborate very closely with each of the colleges and divisions to develop an individual plan for the transition to BOCs. I think many of you probably have seen the Madden Report, lots of numbers, it’s a good place to start and we have to sit down with each college and division to do an individual plan for them. They need to be able to take a look at the numbers that the Madden Report has provided. I see the transition happening so that we don’t just pull everyone out, that we have to allow that transition to take place. Those learning new jobs and new duties will have an opportunity to work with the people before they leave the building. I think it’s very important for Division Directors not to be worse off because of this before we have even opened the Centers. So I think it’s very important that we customize this and we do it individually and so that each customer can get the best out this.

Improved processes are the key to success and if we have processes that may be broken or are not functioning as well as they need to, to just move them and put them in another location in the BOC an do them the same way is not going to make any difference so you have to do process improvement, and BORST with the Industrial Extension Service (IES) is doing the value mapping right now on travel and they are looking at another fifteen processes, so work is going on all the time with these and I think it has a lot of potential to making a significant difference.

I believe that shared services is going to improve the quality of services, but I know the transition is going to be difficult but I also think that if you can help me do that that we can make the Business Operations Centers as world class as the rest of the university.

QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS

Senator Aspnes--How are you going to assess whether the services have been improved or not?

Inkley - One of the things we are looking at right now is a customer satisfaction survey that we can send out and have a baseline sense of how you feel about your service now.

Don Patty-If we can take some of the key processes and improve them or streamline them and still get the job done then once we start rolling out the Business Operation Centers we will have some standardized processes that should be significantly better.

Senator Campbell - Can I get a copy of the metrics for the DOT?

Inkley – I would be happy to share that. That is not currently a part of the business although down the road there may be other things that would fit into that.

Senator Sztajn—I am curious if you see this set of metrics as equal in importance? How do you see the relationship between the various measures of customer service?

Inkley - The work that is done has to be done right and that’s a given. You can’t give somebody good service if you are not also giving them good quality work. In my way of thinking they are tied.

Senator Hatcher—Will we provide training for employees undertaking new positions and skills?

Inkley—Yes, people will not be doing the same job that they had before they went into a BOC, so training of all the employees is part of the process.

Senator Headen: What are some of the problems you see during the transition?

Inkley responded, it’s change and rather dramatic change. It’s moving people out of the colleges and divisions where they have been working in some cases twenty to twenty five years and putting them in a different environment with different people, with different jobs, so it’s a pretty significant change. With respect to right-sizing, if we just move everybody in mass, we may have too many staff. However, over time I think we will be able to reduce the staff through normal attrition and right-size the BOCs.

Senator Robinson - My preference would be never to have contact with employees of a BOC if I can do it on-line—have you been enabled with the IT staff to make this work?

Secretary Sawyers – We have talked about that. Ideally I like to scan my documents and hit the button and be done with it and that is what we are working towards. If we can do that and still meet the requirements of the state and have the infrastructure/technology to do that, that is our goal.

Senator Hatcher - We are talking about reduction of people and you know we do have a lot of people with a lot of skills and a lot of knowledge. I hope that we are not going to let all of those people walk out the door.

Inkley-I think the most valuable assets of the Business Operation Centers can have is those people who are doing the job now, and that’s the way I look at it.

Senator Moore – Is there a website or contact person you can go to, to let you know when there is a problem?

Don Patty stated that there are three colleges that have done a realignment of businesses on their own and that is totally separate from what we are involved in. There is a feedback on BORST to submit questions. If you don’t want to identify yourself you don’t have to. We want to make sure our units are going well, who they are and how they are operating to incorporate those successes and if things aren’t going well then we can learn from that.

Chair Kellner - How can the faculty help you to get this implemented? Is there a self selected group of faculty that can be helpful? Do you have such a group and would it help you if you did?

Inkley – If this is an appropriate group for that kind of thing it would be wonderful. We welcome any feedback we can get.

7. Remarks – Chandler Thompson- Student Body President
Student Government is made up of three branches – the Executive Branch led by the Study Body President, the Student Senate and the Judicial Branch. After the Student Body President is elected, the Executive Branch appoints commissions and members in the cabinet that they want to work on projects. It has been pretty standard for the last four years. As the Student Body President I serve on a lot of committees. Since I can’t serve on every committee and go to class, other students from the Executive Branch and Student Government and Student Senate volunteer and help on those committees as well.

In the Student Senate all of the senators are elected or appointed. The newly elected Student Senate President Pro Tem, Emerson Barker, is the one that joins you at these meetings. We have committees in the Senate as well so there are a lot of committees and commissions with Student Government and we try to have the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch work together although that is not always successful.

We have the treasury where Student Government receives a $10.85 fee per student. That money goes back to student organizations. One hundred forty thousand dollars go to our appropriations process where student organizations can apply for funding for trips, events, seed money to start up an organization which is where the bulk of the money goes. We receive twenty thousand dollars that Student Government through the year has earmarked for specific projects and events.

The Judiciary Branch doesn’t work with Student Government that much, but is still elected by the Student Body and is a part of Student Government.

Student Government has worked on several projects this year. We’ve started a central calendar, late night dining (atrium open now until 10 p.m. M-Th); the C Store in Bragaw is now open 24 hours. We are focusing on traditions with projects such as BRICK and trying to get students engaged. We have been working on athletic student ticketing, increased accessibility and the Parental Leave Act.

We will be busy this semester working on the search committee for the Vice Chancellor and Dean of DASA. We have elections coming up in March. The final most exciting thing about this year is we are launching the tradition-keeper program. Chandler stated that Student Government is always looking for ways to partner and collaborate with students, faculty and staff.

Senator Campbell—What are the major concerns of the students within the next two or three months?

Thompson – There are some things that I wish I could be here a long time to help make changes in. I think transportation. We’re at the verge of where students would support a fee increase for transportation to get more buses on campus. I think that is not going to happen this semester, but it will be a hot topic in the fall. It’s good to see students use our terminal transportation, not everyone can get a parking pass. Students have been putting bikes on the railing because more students are riding bikes and bike racks are not always available. I think that will be something that the next Student Body President will be working on is helping students with alternative transportation needs.

Senator Zonderman - It seems that the students on campus have been a lot quieter about the legislative cuts—can you comment on that?

Thompson - We try to say that we just advocate for students and education in general. I wish that I could do something to get students to realize that just sending an email and posting on face book is not going to help. We sent out a call via the email list asking if students would volunteer to be in a video that we wanted to make to tell the story of the budget cuts, and one person responded. We are trying to educate students. We can’t mobilize them all to work with us. Different groups on campus are talking about going to the Board of Governors meeting in February and we will see how it goes.

Senator Hatcher encouraged the students to do some sort of outreach as military people come back to campus.

Senator Bourham – Have there been discussions on how to handle the problem of textbooks and their cost?

Emerson Barker responded that the commission has been looking at this. Renting text books and buying from Craig’s list have been looked at.

Chair Kellner - Explain why we have our current system with a separate Student Body President and Student Senate President.

Thompson – Some schools have a Vice President and a Student Body President and NC State does it a little differently with a Student Senate President and a Student Body President. I’m not sure why we have it other than it is a tradition. It can be successful in helping have someone lead the Senate if the organizations all work together. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work that way, but it gives the students more representation.

Senator Lunardi—Is the calendar available during the summer?

Thompson- The format of the calendar on ncsu.edu can be very hard to read and we have noticed that more students are going to Google calendar, so we are also looking at the university communications to change that and maybe consider a different calendar. It may be a service that we already have with our email account. Right now on ncsu.edu on the current student page the calendar is actually feeding into highlighting three or four things on the side. The plan is to keep developing this.

Senator Bourham – Question about the use of MyPack Portal.

Thompson – The main problem with students is that you can’t review your degree audit and search for classes at the same time. OIT knows about this and I’m hoping with some updates they will be able to change that.

Senator Bourham – What is off campus construction (referred to on the handout)?

Thompson: Off campus construction is new apartments going up on Valentine Commons and it was a major issue.

8. Issues of Concern
Senator Tu presented an issue of concern regarding the fact that students can miss 40% of a class and still continue to qualify for financial aid. This will be taken up in the next meeting with Louis Hunt who will be giving remarks.

Senator Campbell suggested that the University should provide increased financial aid for students undertaking study abroad experiences.